Top AI stories of 2017

In the sci-fi film Ex Machina, reclusive inventor Nathan Bateman foresees a bleak future, telling the movie's protagonist Caleb that, "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa." When we don't understand something, we tend to fear it; which is one reason popular movies like Ex Machina and HBO's nail-biting new series Westworld like to imagine futures in which artificial intelligence plots to destroy humanity. Fortunately, AI is far more likely to recommend those titles to your Netflix queue than to result in a dystopian society out of a George Orwell novel. While technologies including Amazon's Alexa have been busy making people's lives outside of the workplace easier, bots were the big office story in 2016, helping companies handle routine tasks such as managing support tickets and streamlining workflows. In the coming years, machine learning will take on more of the non-routine work as well, ushering in the new era of artificial intelligence--one that looks to be far brighter than the future Hollywood typically envisions.